TERZIO, Francesco
(b. ca. 1523, Bergamo, d. 1591, Roma)

Biography

Italian painter and draughtsman. His date of birth is deduced from his will, drawn up in 1551, in which he gave his age as around 28 years. He presumably trained in Bergamo during the 1530s and 1540s. In 1550 he painted a large canvas of the Crucifixion for SS Bartolomeo e Stefano, Lallo, near Bergamo, in which the style is close to the late work of Lorenzo Lotto. A letter from Terzio to Pietro Aretino, written in Milan and dated 11 July 1551, contains many allusions to an otherwise undocumented sojourn in Venice. Shortly afterwards Terzio went to Vienna, where he joined the court of Ferdinand I, King of Hungary and Bohemia, later Holy Roman Emperor.

He remained in Austria for over 25 years, making frequent journeys to Prague (where he designed a fountain for the castle) and a few brief visits to Lombardy. Ambitious and astute, he worked assiduously for the Habsburgs and was particularly active in the 1560s, producing a considerable number of their portraits as well as of other illustrious figures linked with the Austrian royal house, for instance Andrea Doria and Ferrante Gonzaga. Most of these portraits are in Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck, or the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Also for the Habsburgs he produced a corpus of drawings for engravings, executed by Gaspare de Avibus, for a monumental history of the dynasty, and his reputation rests largely on these. Other engravings after his drawings include those of Carlo Borromeo and Charles-Emanuel I, Duke of Savoy.

In his portraiture Terzio sought to emulate Titian, but his works display a tedious formal rigidity. The block-like, wooden figures appear frozen in pompous official poses, with no attempt at conveying psychological insight; the Portrait of a Bearded Man (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo) is alone in his output in not adhering slavishly to these clichés.